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The Cable Industry – 4Q 2017

It was just a year ago where there were numerous industry articles asking if cord cutting was real. There were many who thought that cord cutting would fizzle out and would not be a big deal for the cable industry. But the numbers are not from Leichtman Research Group for the end of 2017 and it shows that cord cutting is now quite real. The following numbers compare the fourth quarters of 2017 and 2016.

4Q 2017

4Q 2016

Change

Comcast

22,357,000

22,508,000

(151,000)

-0.7%

DirecTV

20,458,000

21,012,000

(554,000)

-2.6%

Charter

16,997,000

17,236,000

(239,000)

-1.4%

Dish

11,030,000

12,025,000

(995,000)

-8.3%

AT&T

3,657,000

4,281,000

(624,000)

-14.6%

Cox

4,200,000

4,290,000

(90,000)

-2.1%

Verizon

4,619,000

4,694,000

(75,000)

-1.6%

Altice

3,405,500

3,534,500

(129,000)

-3.6%

Frontier

961,000

1,145,000

(184,000)

-16.1%

Mediacom

821,000

835,000

(14,000)

-1.7%

Cable ONE

283,001

320,246

(37,245)

-11.6%

Total

88,788,501

91,880,746

(3,092,245)

-3.4%

These companies represent roughly 95% of the entire cable market, so these numbers tell the story of the whole market. From what I can see from many of my clients, many small cable companies are likely doing even worse than the big companies.

What’s probably the most significant from these numbers to me is that the overall industry cable penetration dropped to 70% by the end of 2017, down from a high of a few years ago of 75%. There were 126.2 million households at the end of 2017, per statistica, and only 70% of them are buying traditional cable – and that number has certainly dropped more into 2018.

The rate of growth of cord cutting is increasing. In 2016 the industry lost just over 1 million customers and in one year that grew to over 3 million.

It’s not hard to see where these customer went. FierceCable reported recently that 5% (over 6 million) of US households subscribe to a vMVPD service – these are online services that carry smaller bundles of traditional cable channels like Sling TV, Playstation Vue and DirecTV Now. It’s easy to forget that just a year ago most of these services were just getting started.

It’s worth noting that AT&T overall saw only a minor drop in total cable subscribers. While AT&T and their DirecTV subsidiary lost 1.2 million customers, DirecTV now has just over 1.1 million customers. But this still has to be hurting the company since analysts all believe that the margins on the vMVPD services are much slimmer than traditional cable.

Of other note are the large percentage losses of cable customers at Dish, Frontier and Cable One.

Another way to consider these losses is on a daily basis, and the industry lost nearly 8,500 customers per calendar day during the year.

It’s obvious in looking at these number that the cable industry is now in the same kind of free fall we saw a decade ago with landline telephones. The phenomenon is widespread and 3 million cord cutters means this is every neighborhood in the country. I believe that the pace of cord cutting will continue to accelerate. It’s looked around my own neighborhood and I can’t find anybody who hasn’t either cut the cord or is thinking about doing so.

What surprises me the most is that the big cable companies are not in screaming to the Congress and the FCC to change the rules governing traditional cable. Those rules force the big channel line-ups, and the cord cutting shows that people can be happy with far less than what the programmers are selling. The cable company could be offering more of the skinny bundles offered by the vMVPDs and could retain more bundled customers.